Jimmy was realistic about his prospects as a first-time playwright. He told me that a first play, however brilliant, might have to wait six months, or even a year, for a Broadway production. He was setting his sights on the West End, where the field was less crowded and the waiting time shorter.
Somehow I got a glimpse of Jimmy’s play, a single line and not even a line of dialogue, just a stage direction. I don’t remember how I managed this — it seems a bit fishy, somehow. Normally it’s easy for other people to hide things from me, so perhaps Jimmy let me see that one line on purpose.
It certainly told me a great deal about what he was doing. The stage direction read: Night. Sound of the respirator. Not much ambiguity there. Jimmy was writing about Abadi and Paul. Not only had those two found each other, and the heroic action which would transform both their lives, but now they had found their Homer too, the bard who would make their story live for ever in the minds of men.
I remember one more school expedition, with Alan and Marion presenting a united front for the sake of the children. It was actually rather an ambitious one, to Amsterdam. We were on a tram when Raeburn said something about us being on the Queen’s Highway. Of course I piped up and said we’re not in England so there’s no queen. ‘Oh yes there is!’ he said smartly. ‘It’s Queen Juliana, and we’re on her Highway now, so we will obey and oblige Her Majesty in any way we can!’ I thought it was rotten luck that our school holiday had to be in just about the only other European country that had a ruddy Queen.
The Sit-Upon Boy
We went on a tour of the canals by boat. Most of the boys fitted in the seats very nicely, but not John with his all-but-fixed hips. I couldn’t see a damned thing except the sky. Then Raeburn called out from the aisle on the other side, ‘Would you like to sit on my lap?’ It was a wonderful reunion with Alan, bringing back all the emotions I had felt for him at the beginning. I didn’t want the canal tour to end, so that I could go on being the Sit-Upon Boy. It was only afterwards I remembered that he didn’t have sensation below the waist, so it can’t have meant anything much to him being the Sat-Upon Man.
Contact with Miss Willis was a little more traumatic. At the end of the trip she was helping me down some steps in a wheelchair single-handed. Not the Wrigley, of course. For the trip I was in a pushing chair. She would balance the back wheels on each step and then lower me down to the next one.
It was a mad thing for someone of her size to undertake. Of course she slipped and down we all tumbled, Miss Willis, John Cromer and all. I could see nothing. I had broken Marion’s fall, or rather the wheelchair had. She had somehow moulded round me and the Wrigley, blocking out all light.
I was pinned under her mighty bosom. It was very soft. Her body was all forgiveness, not at all authoritarian. I became aware for the first time of her subtle perfume. I could confirm at first hand what Luke Squires had said about her freedom from pong. She smelled of soapy flannels and rubber ducks.
I was rather shaken up, but it was worse for poor Marion Gertrude. She wept with pain and shock, retrieving a hanky from her sleeve to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. I was still buoyed up by the thrill of sitting on Raeburn’s lap, and her sufferings didn’t make as much impression as they should have.
Almost Mum’s first words on my return were, ‘Well, I hope you’re going to sit down and write them a thank-you letter. They’ve gone to a lot of trouble for you, you know.’ All the same she was surprised when I picked up a piece of paper and put it in my typewriter straight away. She preferred her scoldings to be ineffectual, so that they could be repeated without limit.
‘Dear Mr Raeburn and Miss Willis,’ I wrote. ‘Thank you so much for taking me to Holland for such a wonderful holiday. I shall remember it for ever, especially the canal trip.’ I was going to return the carriage of the typewriter, and underline the last four words, but decided against it. Extreme caution was called for. My Alan fixation was Top Secret, and I had to get a message past the guards, namely Mum and Miss Willis. Mum checked over my letter — she vetted everything I wrote, there was nothing I could do to stop her — and said it was fine, sealed it and stamped it. So my love letter got past at least one of the guards …
I was ashamed to learn when I went back to Vulcan that Miss Willis had broken three ribs in the accident with me. She wasn’t really well enough to be running the school, but as she said, if she didn’t do what had to be done, who would? Seeing Marion, dishevelled and unwell, somehow holding onto the reins made me feel guilty that I had been the cause of her misfortune. For a while I thought nothing but tender thoughts about poor Marion Gertrude.
Eventually Marion’s injuries healed, but the psychological damage done by the rift with Alan was more intractable. She began to feel threatened when pupils showed too much initiative, a rare enough event in a disabled school and one which she might have set herself to welcome. That after all was the rationale of the school, to protect disabled boys less than their misguided families would tend to do. She didn’t repudiate her philosophy of goading into independence, but she began to show signs almost of smothering.
Acts Two and Three
Abadi Mukherjee got it into his head that his great friend Paul Dandridge should see India. He wanted to show him a different world. The practical difficulties were enormous, but Abadi wasn’t deterred by them, and neither was Paul.
Marion did everything she could to discourage them. She didn’t quite have the nerve to say that there was such a word as ‘can’t’ after all, but she made it pretty clear that there was such a word as ‘shouldn’t’ and such a phrase as ‘would be mad to’.
She told Abadi that Paul would die in his care, but this argument didn’t even begin to work on him. If it hadn’t been for Abadi Paul would be dead already, wasn’t that so? That historic reprieve made him invulnerable. Neither Abadi nor Paul responded to her threats. On their side strings were pulled, appeals made, until Air India offered them free plane tickets. Abadi’s parents were very wealthy, so I suppose the fact that free tickets were so welcome must mean they weren’t helping.
Marion’s heart must have sunk when she discovered that the mad trip seemed to be going ahead despite her objections. Then it got worse, much worse. Abadi turned down the airline tickets and decided to go overland. He would feed, bathe and change Paul. At night he would run the respirator off the car battery.
Abadi’s passion had always been driving, which he claimed he’d been doing in India since he was eight. We’d heard that his grandfather was an enthusiastic driver who had once run over eighteen beggars in a single day (he didn’t say if they were all in a clump, or if they had been picked off individually), so it was in his blood. He would get his licence, and then he would make it happen.
It took him a long time to get sponsorship for the trip. In fact it took years. He managed it in the end and off the pair of them went on their mad adventure. When they reached Delhi, Mrs Gandhi came out to welcome them. I’m not sure she was Prime Minister at this point, but certainly a figure on the world stage.
I had mixed feelings about the overland-to-India saga. Sometimes it seemed to me that Abadi and Paul were making things too easy for their chronicler James Delaney/Kettle, by throwing in Acts Two and Three free of charge.
The Skull of Doom
The infestation of fantasy which was such a distinctive feature of Vulcan School did us no harm, when it was a matter of James Bond paraphrase or even rip-roaring buckaroo porn. It was only when Miss Willis’s damaged emotional state was stirred into the mixture that mischief was done. The last manifestation of fantasy that I witnessed in my time at Vulcan was decidedly Gothic, and it did real harm to at least one vulnerable person.